The Five Rules of Ad Building

Our core aim is to encourage you to design your ad to look exactly how you wish and not try and get in your way by forcing you to use certain components and build patterns. However, to ensure that your ad will work when delivered, there are five rules that we do ask you to follow for excellent results:

1. Include the core library

Our core library, available in Flash and Javascript, contains the functionality necessary to make rich media ads work.

If building the ad in Flash, you need to download and install the component suite and then ensure that you include the core component in your movies. Read more about the Core Flash component.

If building the ad in HTML5, you need to download the core javascript library. Read more about building HTML5 ads.

2. Track clickthroughs and interactions

Rich media ads can contain multiple clickthroughs, i.e links to other websites. To ensure that ONE by AOL: Creative tracks every time a user clicks through from an ad to another site, it is vital that you use the ADTECH.click(‘name’[,'url']) function or click component for all clickthroughs. This references our core ad server, ADTECH IQ.

Rich media ads often contain other interactive elements for the user to click on, or rollover. This interaction keeps the user in the ad unit itself, unlike a clickthrough. It is crucial that this interaction is also tracked so that it can be reported on when the ad is live. We therefore ask you to make a call to ADTECH.event(‘name’) when such an event occurs.

Read more about tracking clickthroughs and interactions in Flash.

3. Load files the ONE by AOL: Creative way

Rich media ads often consist of more than one file. It is common for a main file to load in one or two additional files (e.g. images or videos). To make sure that the path to this file is correct wherever and whenever the ad is being delivered, we ask you to wrap any references to a file name in our ADTECH.getFileUrl(‘fileName’) method, or use our File Loader component.

Read more about loading additional files in Flash.

4. Think about your (file) weight!

You must keep your initial (main) file to less than 40k. If you need more file weight than this then you can load in additional files, but only after the web page has loaded. A term commonly used for this kind of ad is Polite�. You can achieve this in code by listening for our page load event with ADTECH.addEventListener(‘type’, listenerFunction) and then loading the file in or, in Flash, using our File Loader component and choosing the Polite option. Read more about building polite loading ads.

5. Tell us if your ad expands or contracts

Some formats (e.g Expand and Page Peel) have an expanded and contracted state. When building these, you have the freedom to expand or contract the ad exactly how you’d like. All we require is that you call one of our functions to tell us when you’re about to expand the ad, and when it’s back in its contracted state. This is so that we can ensure that the content layer that contains your file is resized to match your design. The two methods you need to call are ADTECH.expand() and ADTECH.contract().

Read more about using the ADTECH.expand() and ADTECH.contract() functions in Flash.